My grandpa supposedly caught them many years ago in the red above texoma. However, eels must travel to the sargasso sea to spawn, and the young then migrate back up the rivers. Texoma was impounded in 1944, meaning any eels above the dam would be over 71 years old. That's unlikely given the oldest captured in the wild was 43 years. Any up there now would've had to be released upstream from the dam.

My grandpa supposedly caught them many years ago in the red above texoma. However, eels must travel to the sargasso sea to spawn, and the young then migrate back up the rivers. Texoma was impounded in 1944, meaning any eels above the dam would be over 71 years old. That's unlikely given the oldest captured in the wild was 43 years. Any up there now would've had to be released upstream from the dam.

Weird fish, them eels.....

I'd say there's at least a chance that some eels managed to get around the dam, either in other streams and moved across watersheds during flooding, or through other means of transport. If the crazy fish can spawn in the Sargasso Sea, along with their identical cousins, the European eel, then the babies separate out and go East or West as the case for each species demands, then they might just be smart enough to figure out how to get across some of those dams. However, I'm certain that they'd be a rarity rather than just a curiosity in such places.

Fishing for eels above Texoma would likely prove an exercise in futility.

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." --Thomas Jefferson,

The Anguillidae are a family of fishes that contains the freshwater eels. The 19 species and six subspecies in this family are all in genus Anguilla. They are catadromous, meaning they spend their lives in freshwater rivers, lakes, or estuaries, and return to the ocean to spawn.